You Can Write Devastatingly Effective Docs - Barbara Minto and the Pyramid Principle

Uh-oh, you wrote another meandering doc where your reviewers lost the plot. Maybe you just sent out a long-winded email announcement that was met with more confusion. Or your tech spec is met with that famous question: "what are we solving here again?"

What if there was a way to focus your ideas and communicate them clearly and concisely? Barbara Minto did just that in 1985 in her seminal book, The Pyramid Principle and its now-famous SCQA framework. How might we learn from her so that we can be effective written communicators in a remote work world?

Join us as we help a beleaguered tech lead edit their team's product spec by learning about the key components of the SCQA framework. We'll learn how to deliver the core ideas first, build logical, deductive arguments, and win approval and achieve alignment along the way. You'll leave with a clear understanding of how to uplevel your technical communication with leadership and your colleagues!

Transcript

1. You Can Write
   Devastatingly Effective Docs!
   Andrew Hao
   @andrewhao
   g9labs.com
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2. We are excited to announce that our team plans to move to
   cloud-based SaaS services. However, we need to control our
   costs in order to remain profitable. We plan to use a mix of
   private and public clouds to host our applications. We will
   use Google Cloud at first to host our Pizza Browsing
   endpoints, but because of the high cost variances we expect
   to need to also leverage Azure and AWS for other services.
   We will use a hybrid approach to migrate our applications.
   We will use containerization to move our applications to
   the cloud, and we will use scripts to automate the
   ⁉ What is going on here?
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3. The Gift of Clarity
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4. Barbara Minto,
   Trailblazer
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6. The Minto Pyramid
   📐 aka “The Pyramid Principle”
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7. The
   Intro
   The
   Structure
   &
   2⃣ Two parts
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8. SCQA The
   Pyramid
   &
   2⃣ Two parts
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9. SCQA
   📜 The Intro
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10. Situation
    C
    Q
    A
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11. Situation
    Complication
    Q
    A
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12. Situation
    Complication
    Question
    A
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13. Situation
    Complication
    Question
    Answer
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14. S
    C
    Q
    A
    Our annual attrition rate is usually X%
    In this tight job market, it has gone up to Y%
    What can we do to retain key talent?
    We believe we should…
    ✏ You try it
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15. The Pyramid
    🏛 The Structure
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16. ✏ You try it
    Assemble task force to
    evaluate fully-remote
    work
    Move from annual to
    semi-annual promo
    cycles
    Overhaul our talent
    philosophy
    The Answer
    Recalibrate salaries with
    latest market data
    The Key
    Points
    … … … … … … … … …
    The Data
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17. Let’s see some
    more!
    🪴Pyramids, pyramids, pyramids
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18. S
    C
    Q
    A
    Normally our product is reliable
    We have suffered several major outages recently
    How can we restore product reliability?
    We believe we should…
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19. ✏ You try it
    Review operational
    metrics regularly in
    meetings
    Create slack by reducing
    team load
    Revamp the on-call
    process
    The Answer
    Decompose shared
    rotation into multiple
    rotations
    The Key
    Points
    … … … … … … … … …
    The Data
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20. S
    C
    Q
    A
    We have been focusing on top-line user growth
    by measuring Daily Active Users (DAU)
    We are unable to retain these new users, who
    leave our platform after an average of Y months
    How can we have a more holistic measurement
    of business performance?
    We believe we should…
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21. ✏ You try it
    It measures the right
    things for customer
    retention
    It measures the right
    things for everything else
    Change our north star
    metric from DAU to XYZ
    The Answer
    It measures the right
    things for customer
    acquisition
    The Key
    Points
    … … … … … … … … …
    The Data
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22. Think before you write
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    💡 The key takeaway
    

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23. Happy writing!
    More pyramids! @andrewhao
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